
Replace Inline Styles in Gatsby with an External CSS File
Replace Gatsby inline styles with an external stylesheet when needed, weighing render speed, caching, CSS Modules, styled‑components, and cleaner output.
Articles
Front‑end web development is my personal niche, it is the art of creating visual and interactive elements for a website, including layout, design, and interactivity, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Below you will find a subset of articles from my blog specifically about Front‑End Development. This is an area that I have worked with for many years, and have managed to write about quite a few times. There are three hundred thirty‑seven collected together for you below.

Replace Gatsby inline styles with an external stylesheet when needed, weighing render speed, caching, CSS Modules, styled‑components, and cleaner output.

Based in Brighton, I offer expert web development services in the South East. With 21+ years' experience, I deliver tailored, future‑proof solutions.
Although an extremely useful aspect of Gatsby, source maps cause a performance hit as well as leaving your source exposed. Here is how to turn them off!

next/image`next/image` explained with responsive sizing, lazy loading, layout shift reduction, and why image optimisation matters in real Next.js applications.

gatsby‑image Even FurtherOptimise gatsby‑image further with sensible maxWidth, quality settings, native lazy loading, GraphQL image data, and avoiding oversized assets in Gatsby.

Finding and replacing numbers in a string with JavaScript is a relatively straightforward task, although which regex you use (and how) can impact readability.

Browsers now support the 'copy' element event, which allows developers to intercept and modify content placed onto a clipboard, when copied from their site.

Dynamic imports and code splitting in Next.js explained with `next/dynamic`, lazy‑loaded components, SSR trade‑offs, and when splitting really helps.

Add static files to a Gatsby site using the static folder, with notes on build output, verification files, legacy assets, and when not to process files.

Understand parent selectors in CSS and Sass, including how ampersand nesting works, :has() context, BEM trade‑offs, specificity, and readability.

Deploy a static Gatsby build over FTP with environment variables, ftp‑deploy, build scripts, and a practical CI flow for conventional or legacy hosting.

Orphans are annoying single‑word lines of text that hang at the end of a paragraph. It is straightforward using React and JS to banish them from your site.

getStaticPaths in Next.js`GetStaticPaths` in Next.js explained with dynamic routes, pre‑rendered paths, fallback behaviour, and how static generation works for slug‑based pages.

In typography, a 'widow' is the last line of a paragraph, which falls alone on the following page or column. On the web, this can be easily tackled with CSS.

Render greater‑than and less‑than symbols in JSX safely, using strings or HTML entities while avoiding parser confusion and awkward React output.

Reduce image brightness with CSS filters, including brightness(), animation, dark‑mode eye strain, visual treatment, and where filter effects are useful.

Comment in JSX without breaking React parsing, including curly‑brace block comments, why HTML comments fail, and gotchas around rendered output clearly.

getStaticProps vs. getServerSideProps in Next.js`GetStaticProps` vs. `getServerSideProps` in Next.js explained with build‑time and request‑time data fetching, trade‑offs, and practical page examples.